“Sometimes I feel inside that I’m really a large black woman,” said Fine Arts Administrator and Resident Director, Adam Wheat. A trip to his office in JPAC resulted in not only many laughs, but also the telling of an eventful and unique Ouachita experience and insight into an eccentric personality unlike any other Ouachita faculty member. While he may serve as a Fine Arts Administrator and Resident Director, Wheat has a history at Ouachita built on hard work and an excessive amount of extracurricular activity.
In the fifth grade, Wheat and his family moved to Monroe, Louisiana before Duck Dynasty was cool. It was there that Wheat had to work on fitting in amongst his peers.
“When I was relatively new to Monroe, I was out on the playground talking to an older group of girls. It felt special that they were talking to me,” Wheat said. “I was wearing wind suit pants, they were a phenomenon in the 90s. It should never be repeated. Then some sixth grade guy came up behind me and pulled them down, right in the middle of the playground. There I was in whatever underwear I was wearing. The girls looked at me, I looked at them. So I just pulled them up and walked away. One girl followed me and said, ‘You should tell someone about this,’ but I just turned my face towards a tree and did not speak because I was trying to overcome all of my emotions. It was a mortifying introduction to my school.”
While in high school, Wheat took interest in productions, graphic design and writing. When it came time to visit Ouachita, Dr. Root showed him around the Mass Communications department. He fell in love with the major instantly, recalling how it was “a little bit of everything that I liked to do.”
He later graduated from Ouachita Perish High School, making the transition from being a Ouachita Lion to a Ouachita Tiger. “I was really sad that there wasn’t a grad school called the Ouachita Bears so that I could complete the quote from Wizard of Oz.”
Upon his arrival, Adam made the most of his time at Ouachita. Under the direction and “creative brains” of roommate Rance Collins, the two produced three feature length films over the course of three summers. An editing room in Lile is now called the AMM Video Editing Suite, which stands for “A Movie Musical,” named after two of the films Wheat helped create with Collins. “We learned so much about working with each other, working with other people that are different from you, we learned so much about filmmaking,” he recalled on his summers in Arkadelphia. “We even had premieres here on campus, so we learned how to do events and get publicity for the films we made. That sort of hands-on, practical stuff here at Ouachita is what I remember. If people get together and you cast that vision, you can accomplish really amazing things.”
When filmmaking wasn’t on the agenda, Adam worked as a member of the Ouachita Student Foundation. There he helped in the box office for Tiger Tunes and eventually started making promotional items for them. This ultimately led to his involvement in the arts and his current position at Ouachita.
Outside the office, Wheat keeps his creativity flowing in several different ways. “I collect pop-up books, and not your momma’s pop-up books either. There’s quite an artistry to a really beautiful pop-up book. I have a collection of some that are done by truly amazing artists.”
In addition, Wheat continues his passion for writing. He’s been writing scripts since junior high, and even wrote a script for the Motion Picture Production class offered at OBU. After graduating in 2010, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Full Sail University. He is currently writing skits for Camp Siloam in Siloam Springs, as well as a personal project titled “Man Over-Hoard,” an a cappella musical centered around a hoarder.
Because of his memorable, four-year Ouachita experience and his instilled love for the arts, Wheat now hopes to transfer that same experience to current and future students. “I love to see people learn and grow, and to be a part of that with them. That’s why I am an experience-maker,” Wheat said. “People joke that I watch the people at movies more than the movie itself, because I like to see people experience things. So that’s a lot of my heart for what I do at Ouachita. That’s why I’m involved in so many different things, I just want to be a part of helping people have those experiences that are formative and help them to grow and develop.”
– By Barrett Pfeiffer
